HELPING CAPITALISTS WOULD NOT HELP THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM
Daya Varma
Every one knows that the present economic crisis, which started from the U.S. is now affecting the whole world. Yet capitalism as a system is not about to collapse like did the Soviet-brand of socialism. Yet the solution being devised by leaders of the capitalist world are helping individual capitalists but not the system.
Periodic crises are the essence of capitalism but they by themselves never spell its doom. It has happened before and it is happening now. But unlike the crisis of the Soviet brand of socialism which led to its replacement by age-old capitalism or unlike the Chinese experiment with the Cultural Revolution which ushered in the era of Deng Tsao Peng, who invented “socialism with Chinese characteristics” the current economic crisis in the capitalist world would not give rise to a non-capitalist system. Instead it would devise means of rejuvenating capitalism albeit with hurdles and erratic as well as unscientific efforts.
Capitalist crises start from the top because only the top has a controlling edge on capital but ultimately finds its way to innocent bystanders, the ordinary working people who neither shared the capital nor ignited the crises. This happened in the 1930’s and will happen now as well. Of course the custodians of capitalism from Obama to Manmohan Singh, who know economics when it works but not when it does not, are making frantic efforts to rescue it. However, given their empathy for and familiarity with the custodians of capital, they are going the wrong way, absolutely wrong way.
The left is even more helpless. Being sure that this crisis would not usher an era of socialism eradicating all contradictions of capitalism, they are happy criticizing one government after another. The dismal interim budget at the tail end of the present Indian government gives them more specific points to lash the Manmohan Singh government and continue it to the next one to arrive in about three months. But the system continues. The Governments of Iceland and Latvia collapsed and that in Ireland might follow but the system is intact in all these places. So it is difficult to understand what is the rejoicing of the left all about?
The interim budget in India doled cash to custodians of capital like Reliance, Sun TV Network, Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals, etc. just as the US government did to its own corporations. This is sheer waste of taxpayers’ money. It can neither save these corporate giants nor hinder the effect of this crisis on ordinary people. What all these governments need to do is to take drastic measures to increase the purchasing and consuming power of ordinary citizens, who are the foundations of any economic order, even capitalism. Let the existing corporations lick the dust, new ones will come. Why save them? They must die so new ones can be born. A new era will usher in the same way as happened before. Enriching the ordinary citizens alone can deal with the present economic crisis.